Thar A prosperous treasure
[Music]
in the next 18 minutes
i will be talking about a
subject or topic which seemingly
makes a lot of sense but if you look
around
it’s not very common so i’ll be talking
about
sustainability and specifically
sustainable business development and
i’ll be talking about that in the
context of the third coal
project which
we believe is being developed in a
sustainable
and inclusive manner taking care
not only of the energy requirements of
the country
but also taking care of the principal
stakeholders
of the project which we believe are the
people of thir parker
so energy security through sustainable
development
that is what we believe thar can offer
to the country and to all of us
i will not talk about a lot of technical
details
but just to set the context right those
of you
who don’t know we have set up pakistan’s
first
open pit coal mine in third block 2
which is producing almost 4 million tons
of lignite every year
and for the past one and a half years we
have we have produced six and a half
million tons of lignite
which has powered two 330 megawatt
mine mouth power plants which is set up
uh
by a private company and it has produced
6.4
billion kilowatt hours of electricity
which has gone to the national grid
so those of the people who there are
still some
who believe okay there is no
you know coal in third it is not good it
has got a lot of sulphur it is not good
for power generation
all those myths have been busted so
anybody who ask you tell them third coal
has produced electricity for the past
one and a half years
and in charlotte will produce
electricity and power the country
for the next 50 years or more
so moving on because
you cannot talk about sustainability or
the betterment of people unless you have
a
source of economic revenues and the
source of economic revenues in our case
is the huge potential of third coal
which allah has blessed our country
175 billion tons of coal
that is the estimated amount of coal
which is present in third parker
and it is good for hundreds of years of
you know energy requirements for the
country the way we have developed our
project is in phases
so we have already completed phase one
we are now into phase two whereby we are
doubling the capacity of the mind
and mining is a game of economy of scale
so we are
increasing the mine and lowering the
cost of coal initial cost was high
but ultimately the coal coal price as
you see this green line
comes down when we do phase two
we will be equal to almost equal to the
imported coal price
and then at phase three and phase four
subsequent phases will take third coal
price
to a level whereby it will become the
cheapest
base load energy uh resource for the
country
inshallah and that is not very far and
who has done it
yes there were chinese who have come and
supported us
but these are the two people dilip kumar
from nagar parker
and chetan kumar from mithi both
graduates of this university
2009 who are now the mind managers of
third block to mine these are both
2009 graduates and other than them
there are 79 mehran engineering
university graduates who are currently
working at the mine and power plants
79 people from this university
so the real purpose of third coal was
not to produce cheap electricity for
people sitting in slab
karachi or rest of the country we do not
want to do
what unfortunately was done in
balochistan
the entire country you know benefited
from sui gas but if you go there right
now you know what’s the situation over
there
people are still burning firewood you
know for their
heating and cooking needs so we want
that our project should be developed in
an inclusive manner
whereby we take care of the triple
bottom line
you must have heard that sustainability
basically talks about
the environment the economy
and the society or the triple bottom
line they call it
the people planet and prosperity all
three unless all three go together the
project is not successful
and this is what our sponsors which is
the government of
and a combination of private companies
decided that we will do this project in
a manner that it will bring prosperity
to the real stakeholders of the project
which are the people of third park
how are we doing it we set up a
not-for-profit organization called
foundation and the the chief operating
officer of third foundation
is also a mehran graduate sitting here
naseem asab
so our vision was that while we produce
electricity
from coal we will make sure that we take
sustainable and graduated
interventions in different areas
so that the lives of the 30 people
improve as we go along and
the benchmarks that we used for our csr
work
was not something which is traditionally
called csr you see a sr option school
setup
these are things which unfortunately
corporates do
uh mostly for lip service we don’t want
lip service
we want that any intervention that we do
in third parkar
is sustainable and the only way you can
do it
is to align your business needs with
the community requirements and if there
is a good match
your project will be success and we
told ourselves that unless we make a
positive
change in the lives of the 30 people we
will not term
third coal a successful project so we
selected
united nations sustainable development
goals sdgs most of you must have heard
it
sdgs there are 17 goals and
basically the prioritized goals in the
center that you see
encompass all the basic necessities
of human life and if you
are compliant in all these goals
then you can say that your society the
community the city the town
is unsvg compliant all 130
countries of the world have signed up
that they will become
unsdg compliant by 2030. what our vision
for thar parker is that we
together with government of sindh will
inshallah make
slam code which has a population of 250
000 people or quarter of a million
people where all these coal fields are
to become unsdg compliant by 2025
five years ahead of the global timeline
and this is not just a slogan
i’ll tell you what are some of the steps
which we have taken
to make sure that we inshallah will
achieve our target by 2025.
[Applause]
on the left you see this was a school
building
or a school hut this is exactly three
and a half kilometers
from our coal mine 2015 mansingbird
village
this small jumpity or hut
used to be a school where 70
children were studying from grade one to
five with one teacher
who has not been paid for the last six
months
so while we were setting up this two
billion dollars project
just three kilometers away from this
village of mines mansing bill
we we thought that what good is our
project
if the children living around us have to
go to schools in huts like this so we
decided
that we will change all that we will be
responsible
for quality education for the entire
block too which is our lease area as
well as islam code
if the government of sin chips in with
us so we what we set up was
uh nine of these third foundation
schools these are primary schools
and within block two and uh
islam court area we have
2500 students right now
who are studying in these schools free
of cost some of these schools we have
collaborated with tcf
but some of the schools are being run by
ourselves
so this is because without education
we believe that the people of third will
not be enabled
to be part of our project
[Applause]
the other thing which we did was as i
mentioned we aligned our business needs
with what the community can offer
in the project we required a lot of you
know workforce
scaffolders steel fixers masons painters
and instead of bringing skilled people
from punjab or kpk
drivers from miyawali we thought that
why not train
local theories and let them do this job
instead of hiring them as
unskilled laborers we can train them
through institutions like dti nlc amon
tech
and others and by doing three months or
six months courses we trained these
local
almost 1400 thirties into these skills
and they
started earning a lot more money than a
simple
usl would by working in the mining and
the power project
we also started the 30 engine training
engineers program
whereby we sent 73 engineers including
three
females to china for six months and out
of those 73
67 are currently employed at the power
plant and they are operating this
coal-fired power plant in third part
these are all people from third
and adjoining districts we
talk about health if you talk about
thirpaka is one of the lowest human
development indices
in entire pakistan i think it ranks one
or four out of the 114 districts in
pakistan
so it would be very shameful that
corporations and government is doing
multi-billion dollar project
while the people in thir parker are
dying of
hunger of you know lack of water
lack of basic health needs you know this
doesn’t make sense
so we thought we must do interventions
in health
and the first thing we set up was a
mother and child clinic called the marvy
mother
mother and child clinic whereby almost
uh i think
25 000 people have been treated
but the big intervention we did was to
set up 120 bed
state of the art hospital in
collaboration with
uh you know government of sin and other
private uh donors so this is some of the
views of
these uh things now we are a mining
company
mining company doesn’t do you know
prosthetics for
amputees this is a camp that we ran
last year so we partnered with nayakadam
and we have this artificial prosthetic
limbs
camp in sir parker which was done last
year over 115 people benefited
and some of them are gainfully employed
there are people who
were playing cricket you know playing
soccer after getting these limbs filled
and the biggest problem in third park is
water as you all know
there’s lots of other plants but most of
them are not running
so what we decided was that within our
project affected area within our third
block 2 and
wherever we have done interventions
we’ve taken over all the government
owned auto plants and we started
operating it ourselves
they were in a not so good condition
when we took them over
we refurbished all of them and right now
there are 18 narrow plants being run
in our area providing who standard
quality water to almost
40 000 people and the best thing about
it
is this now 12
30 local females have been trained as
auto plant operators it took us
you know three months just to train them
to how to run an auto plant
and in the same villages where they’re
living now they are operating the auto
plants
earning you know eighteen thousand five
hundred rupees a month
working from you know four to six hours
a day and
the people are so happy
now the other intervention is uh
flagship project which is
uh the dump truck training program i
think
you all must have seen um
videos from al jazeera and dw
and other news outlets who have covered
this story
and this is not just a lip service there
are right now
26 30 females who are driving these dump
trucks right now gainfully employed
they’re not trainees anymore
because this program took a lot of time
and this ladies and gentlemen
is an example of how
resilient the people of third park are
the the the women in the center is
called mohini
she was 10 years old when she got
married 12 years old when she had her
first child
and she has five kids and at the age of
28 she decided to become a dumper truck
driver
now imagine a female from mithi driving
a 60-ton drum truck
with five kids who was married at 10
years old
that is resilience getting to a college
college and university and studying and
that is not resilience
we are all very lucky these are the
people who actually
you know deserve to be helped and
deserve to be appreciated deserve to be
enabled and empowered
empowered
uh again community needs we have 4 000
people in our block
and they all have to eat lunch so we
went to the villages and asked for
ladies who could cook you know we have
19 canteens
running and we told them okay let’s cook
uh you know
as much as you can and this lady she
cooks 150
uh meals a day and we instead of you
know
getting a caterer from karachi like you
know the famous caterers
we told them let’s get home cooked food
from tarpakar
so it’s just alignment of business needs
with what the community can offer
and she’s earning 15 000 rupees a month
there there’s a widow
and she’s got two daughters they’re all
working and now she’s hiring more people
from our village
to supply food to our company so we did
nothing this is simply
just an alignment of the needs now
resettlement one of the villages got
resettled and i
i invite all of you after the covet
pandemic you know ends uh to come to
thir parker
and visit this village this is truly a
model village one of the most successful
relocations in the history of pakistan
whereby we’ve you know uh provided all
these housing facilities
to the people who have been moved and
they will be getting 100 000 rupees
per month lifetime um
per family and this has been announced
by the government of sin and for two
years they have already been getting
this so it’s not just a
you know promise that will not be
fulfilled they will be
compensated we have planted more than
850
000 uh trees under the million tree
program in third park
uh for every tree that we cut we almost
plant 27 29 trees
versus five that is required the
biosaline agriculture the
the the saline water that we take out is
used for agriculture
fish in thor you must not have heard
about fishing in third
we have actually proven it in the
reservoir of guarano
so all of this ladies and gentlemen was
done
because we believe as a company
that unless we take care
of the people of third park under whose
feet these coal reserves
have been discovered our project will
not be successful
and these are just tiny steps i am not
saying that we are there
maybe we have done five percent six
percent of what we need to do
but if all the projects in the country
are developed
in this inclusive development manner
whereby
the people in the communities around the
projects are taken care of
i’m sure our country will transform we
believe
third will inshallah trump transform
karbaland pakistan and pakistan will
inshallah be a better country
in the next five years thank you very
much for your time thanks a lot